In junior high and high school I was totally obsessed with
getting high grades. But one semester into my career at Cal,
I realized that A's were going to become more scarce and my
grade-point average was going to suffer. Then I discovered
this neat little option called "passed/not passed," which
means that your final score in the course won't affect your
GPA.

The first thing I learned about p/np was that College of
Letters and Sciences students, of which I'm one, are allowed
to take up to 19 percent of our units p/np. The second was
that most departments require you to take all courses in
your major for a letter grade.

Armed with that information, I had my first bad
experience with p/np the second semester of my freshman
year. All philosophy majors are required to take a course in
logic. Those who click with logic usually get A's; those who
don't try to take it passed/not passed. I loved the class,
but by the midterm it was clear that I was one of those
people who just didn't get it. The deadline to switch
grading options was the very same day, but I hadn't yet
learned that the philosophy department allows its majors to
take one philosophy class passed/not passed. The deadline
came and went and my GPA took the hit.

My second mishap came that same semester. I needed to
meet the quantitative reasoning breadth requirement, but was
afraid of college-level math. My numbers skills had been
substandard ever since I was forced in ninth grade to take
trigonometry from the high school basketball coach. So I
opted to take my required Cal math class passed/not passed.

Since I was not taking the course for a letter grade, I
didn't do much homework. A C- is a passing grade and that's
all I was aiming for. After finals, I learned that I had
pulled a C. Since the letter grade didn't affect my grade
point, I was pleased with my poor performance. A few months
later, L&S sent a nice letter informing me that courses
taken p/np do not count for the quantitative reasoning
requirement. I had to file a petition to retroactively
switch the grading, and my GPA ate the C.

You'd think that by senior year I would have figured out
how to play the game, but I must be a slow learner. Snafu
number three came last semester with my Heidegger class. I
figured that since Heidegger is supposed to be one of the
most difficult philosophy courses, it was the ideal time to
take advantage of the one p/np philosophy course to which I
was entitled. Unfortunately for me, the class was so well
taught that I got an A- despite my best efforts to do
poorly. The A- would have counteracted my earlier p/np
mistakes -- if it had counted toward my GPA.

They say that when you gamble, the house always wins.
When it comes to grades, it seems the university holds all
the cards.